The Limerick Incident Wasn't an "EPPI"
Relax, It’s Just a Run-of-the-Mill Nuke Spill
by DAVE LINDORFF
The idea that the Limerick nuclear generating plant is “routinely discharging” nuclear waste into the Schuylkill River and that this is permitted by the NRC, and that by extension this is being done by all the nuclear generating plants across the nation, will no doubt come as a big surprise to most Americans, including those who live downstream and downwind of these plants (because it turns out that there are also permitted regular releases of radioactive gas by these other facilities). But that’s the truth. |
No public announcement of this spill was made at the time, so the public in those communities had no idea that it had occurred, and water system operators had no opportunity to shut down their intakes from the river. There was no report about the spill in Philadelphia’s two daily newspapers or on local news programs.
Only weeks later, after the regional office of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was finally sent an official report by Exelon, the owner of the plant, did a public notice get posted on the NRC’s website, after which some excellent reporting on the incident was done by Evan Brandt, a reporter for a local paper called The Pottstown Mercury.
We contacted the NRC regional office with oversight over Limerick and were told that Exelon had only reported the incident to state authorities — the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA). A call to the DEP elicited a response that the state agency, now in the hands of a Republican governor who has shown open distain for environmental concerns ranging from nuclear
waste to regulation of natural gas fracking chemicals, that it did not feel it was necessary to issue any public report on the spill. “Exelon assured us that it was not an EPPI incident,” explained DEP regional office spokeswoman Deborah Fries.
“What’s an EPPI?” she was asked. “It’s an Event of Potential Public Interest,” Fries replied.
In other words, Exelon and the state’s DEP and PEMA officials, meeting behind closed doors, agreed that the spilling of up to 15,000 gallons of radioactive isotope-laced reactor water into a river that supplies drinking water to hundreds of thousands of people was not an event of “potential public interest,” and so they didn’t make it public, thus insuring that it would not become a matter of public interest, or even of public knowledge! The logic is impeccable, though the NRC subsequently protested that Exelon should have reported the incident to the commission, which would automatically have posted it on its website as public notice of a spill.
But it gets worse. Mercury reporter Brandt discovered that one reason Exelon was able to claim initially that the spill of reactor water into the river was no big deal, and to avoid publicly announcing it, was that it was a “permitted discharge.” Even the NRC report on the incident, when it was finally posted three weeks late, said that the spill had merely been waste water that had “overflowed during a scheduled and permitted radiological release.”
The idea that the Limerick nuclear generating plant is “routinely discharging” nuclear waste into the Schuylkill River and that this is permitted by the NRC, and that by extension this is being done by all the nuclear generating plants across the nation, will no doubt come as a big surprise to most Americans, including those who live downstream and downwind of these plants (because it turns out that there are also permitted regular releases of radioactive gas by these other facilities). But that’s the truth.
MORE > Relax, It’s Just a Run-of-the-Mill Nuke Spill - Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
No comments:
Post a Comment